Court hearings on the 2014 Malaysia MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine being scheduled for Monday is an important step in establishing facts and justice, the French Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Friday
PARIS (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th March, 2020) Court hearings on the 2014 Malaysia MH17 crash in eastern Ukraine being scheduled for Monday is an important step in establishing facts and justice, the French Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Friday.
On Wednesday, The Hague District Court confirmed to Sputnik that the hearings would proceed as normal despite the spread of the coronavirus disease.
"The opening of the lawsuit on March 9 in The Hague on four suspects in the destruction of MH17 flight on July 17, 2014, is an important step in establishing facts and justice for the victims' families and relatives," the spokesman said at a briefing.
The diplomat added that France supported the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) and urged Russia to fully cooperate with the judicial authorities within the framework of the United Nations Security Council resolution 2166.
The Boeing plane, which was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, crashed near the city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. All 298 people aboard were killed. Kiev blamed local militia for the crash, but they said that they had no equipment that would allow them to down a plane at that height.
The JIT, which does not include Russia, made a preliminary conclusion that the plane had been allegedly downed by a Buk missile that belonged to the Russian armed forces. Russia has stressed that it gave the Netherlands radar data and documents proving that the missile belonged to Ukraine, but the information was not taken into account.
The Russian Defense Ministry has said that all of the missiles like the one that the Dutch-led commission showed were decommissioned after 2011.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has said that the accusations against Russia were baseless and the investigation was biased and one-sided. Russian President Vladimir Putin has pointed out that Russia was excluded from the investigation into the crash, and Moscow could only recognize the results of the probe if it was a full-fledged participant.
In June 2019, the Dutch-led investigation team named Russian nationals Igor Girkin, Sergey Dubinsky and Oleg Pulatov, as well as Ukrainian national Leonid Kharchenko as suspects in the case.
